on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war
by possibilist
Summary: 'When she tells Rachel, "You're the shining star out of all of us," she means it; she means that Rachel is what she thinks of when she wishes.' Faberry drabble dealing with the OMW deleted scene.


summary: When she tells Rachel, "You're the shining star out of all of us," she means it; she means that Rachel is what she thinks of when she wishes. faberry drabble because of the omw deleted scene.

an (1): because the _feels_ after seeing the deleted scene in omw. title from edna st. vincent millay's "apostrophe to man."

an (2): listen to bat for lashes' "laura."]

on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again

.

_pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome_

...

There are moments, infinite space between the waltz of her heart, when she imagines something different. She's good at it, too, at making this life she won't ever get to have; she always has been. Her therapist calls it a coping mechanism, but Quinn's pretty sure that it's really just homeostasis—when she was little, Frannie was beautiful and smart and charismatic, and Quinn had to tell herself stories in order to survive, to escape.

Now, she reads Joan Didion and whispers _We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live_ to herself over and over again in the middle of the night. She thinks of Rachel holding her hand; she imagines them walking down the street together. She pictures Rachel's laugh being caused by something Quinn says (and she _can _be funny), and she hears Rachel singing in the middle of the night, after Quinn wakes from dreams so sad she considers them nightmares, tears stinging against her cheeks.

She imagines kisses, limbs, breathy sighs.

Mostly, she imagines telling Rachel secrets, deep, painful things that only one or two people know, and not because Quinn has ever told them—Santana and Frannie know things because they just found out.

Quinn imagines—with an ache like a bomb exploding—_wanting _to tell her, to let her secrets go.

Perhaps she should be reading _The Art of War_, she thinks, but _the anger of the LORD your God will be kindled against you, and He will wipe you off the face of the earth, _and she's never been much for winning wars anyway.

.

It's okay—she's used to living in stories by now—when Rachel doesn't listen to her, because there's still time. There's time for Rachel to realize that she's being an idiot, that, even if Finn was the greatest guy in the entire world (he's not, but she plans this for argument's sake) that Rachel should wait—if they're meant to be, what's a few more months, years?

But Rachel doesn't listen to any attempts, any well-meaning and confused words that Quinn might have to say. Not at school, not during Glee.

The night after she sings "Never Can Say Goodbye," Quinn goes home. She pulls her Whitman anthology off the shelf and flips to the Civil War poems, murmurs them aloud to herself.

It isn't the first time she's read them, but it is the first time she thinks they're beautiful.

.

She breaks, which she's also used to doing. She's just tired, a terrifyingly powerful tired that she's never felt before, not after Beth, not the summer months. This is a tiredness that seeps into the lining of her lungs, her eyelashes, the beds of her fingernails.

It's breathtaking, the way she can't think when Rachel walks out of the fitting room in a wedding dress.

Rachel looks happy but so _young_, and Quinn feels so _old_.

In a split second she thinks of how she's never been a child and that maybe that's why she's fallen so in love with Rachel; because Quinn desperately tried to believe in magic, to believe in fairies and wizards and rabbit holes, but she never quite could convince herself of them until she met Rachel. Rachel, who was small and beautiful and so talented, who was, most importantly, _kind. _Rachel who was sad and Rachel who was happy and Rachel who made Quinn forget.

It crashes down on Quinn so quickly that she doesn't notice she's standing until she's already in front of Rachel, in her pink bridesmaids dress, in front of everyone.

When she tells Rachel, "You're the shining star out of all of us," she means it; she means that Rachel is what she thinks of when she wishes.

Maybe there's a part of her that needs to believe in magic the way she needs to believe in narrative. Homeostasis, except that if Rachel becomes a different species entirely, Quinn isn't sure she'll be able to evolve fast enough to survive.

When Rachel tells her not to come to the wedding, she quietly and simply agrees.

As she walks out to her car, fumbling with the keys, she wonders if this is what everyone felt like every single time they watched her try to become extinct.

.

Quinn says, "It just feels like I'm fighting. All the time. With myself, with people, with wanting to be honest and wanting to lie."

Her therapist, Dr. Hastings, takes a deep breath, then tucks a strand of curly, grey hair behind her ear and situates her glasses against the bridge of her nose. "You don't want to fight, though, right?"

Quinn swallows. "If I knew that what I was fighting for was still there, it would be different." It's painful to acknowledge this fact.

Dr. Hastings nods. "Are you fighting against Finn, or are you fighting against yourself?"

"Both," she says. "Both."

.

She reads _Les Miserables_ and then she takes a deep breath and puts on her Cheerio's uniform. When she hugs Rachel, she thinks _The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or, rather, loved in spite of ourselves _and wills Rachel to understand.

She doesn't cry. She feels powerful in her uniform, like she has armor on.

She's not sure she likes the feeling, because Rachel's soft skin still hurts like hell.

.

After a few seconds where absolutely _nothing _happens, she blinks and can't breathe and can't move, and someone's outside of where her window used to be.

They're saying, "Keep breathing, okay? Look at me."

So she tries to do both, tries to keep her eyes open and tries to breathe, although each task is infinitely more difficult than it ever has been before. It's scary, fantastically so, and then it hurts so much she can't process anything else.

Someone, a paramedic, asks her name, and she nearly chokes out _Lucy _before she remembers. "Quinn," she whispers, and she tries to think of shooting stars and tea as they start sawing and prying apart the twisted metal of her car.

"Keep fighting," they tell her, and then they drag her out. "We're going to have to poke you in the back, okay? It's going to hurt."

And it does, so much that she immediately wishes she was dead, so easily, so quickly. It will scare her later, how ready she was to give up, but for now it's comforting. For a few moments, she closes her eyes and remembers that shooting stars aren't really stars at all; she wonders if God thinks Charles Bukowski wrote prayers, because—_I'M IN LOVE... I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry._

.

Rachel is there once. She's not awake, slumped over in a chair.

_I was asleep while you were dying_, Quinn thinks, only she doesn't say it aloud because she can't breathe.

.

It's a whole different sort of war, she discovers, that involves unruly cells and vertebrae that are beautifully fragile.

Her lungs try to heal, but they won't all the way, she knows; her legs will never regain all the feeling they once had, no matter how hard she works at physical therapy.

At night she lives in this fragility, in the canopy of how close she'd come to never existing anymore. She lies back in bed and lets her fingers trace over the scars, permanent markers that she'd been cut open and put back together. She counts her heartbeats.

She has nightmares, but she also dreams.

.

Things get better, steadily. She decides she'll never drive again, because she just doesn't want to. Judy doesn't mind.

And then she leaves for college, and she comes out, and she starts fighting _for _things, instead of against them.

.

Her homeostasis evolves as she does. She thinks of Hemingway and _A Farewell to Arms _because she just _stops, _and "many are strong at the broken places," as Rachel kisses her scars.

"It wasn't your fault," Quinn says as Rachel cries; she senses they have the same markings, the same blemishes, only Rachel's are invisible against her skin.

But that's what being in love is, she decides, because they are marked but no longer ashamed; they carry the weight of damage and recovery together.

.

The second time she sees Rachel in a wedding dress, Quinn is twenty-six. She still loves Joan Didion, but things are different now, because she doesn't have to tell herself stories any longer: Rachel walks toward her, smile huge and fingers trembling, and Santana is her maid of honor, and (blessedly) no one is wearing pink.

Quinn cries. As she says her vows, she thinks, _Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was._

...

as this was a game of 'how many things can i possibly reference in 1500 words?', here are a few noteworthy ones:

edna st. vincent millay's "apostrophe to man"  
joan didion's we tell ourselves stories in order to live  
sun tzu's _the art of war_  
deuteronomy 6:15  
walt whitman's civil war poems  
victor hugo's les miserables  
charles bukowski's "i'm in love"  
natasha trethewey's "myth"  
ernest hemingway's _a farewell to arms  
_joan didion's "goodbye to all that"


End file.
